#fff201

A/N: just a tale of someone attending an event, only to be left underwhelmed. and how she tries doing something while it's on pause.^^

Word Count: 598

T.W/C.W: None

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"Howdy, folks!" an announcer called, carrying a microphone. She extended an arm, flourishing the spacious stage. "Thanks for showing up! And you know what tonight's gonna be all about, eh?"

(Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial​‘s prompt: Comedian’s Night! Enjoy!)

There’s a party at the end of the world where nothing is real and everything is beautiful.

 And everybody, absolutely everybody, is invited.

 The light alights on you as soon as you step in, and you’re cloaked in starlight. You wear whatever you please, as much or as little as you like. By the time you get to the ballroom, you’ll have encountered ballgowns and sundresses and saris and cheongsams in the finest silks with the shortest hems, and men in all manner of suit and shimmering coats. The ballroom is awash in light, despite the hour, the chandelier twirling overhead and the laughter effervescent.

 The corridors twist like smoke, revealing all manner of secrets at every corner and all manner of delight at every turn. There are paintings all along the walls and the paintings are always changing, though you would never know. They all share the same gilded frames after all, and nobody spends time to stare at paintings when there is music the next door down. The music is always playing, and everyone will tell you how pleasing it is.

 “This is definitely a baroque.”

“No, that’s a Romantic chord. That’s a waltz.”

 Everyone disagrees, but they’re always right anyway.

 There are no rules, you can kiss whoever you like, say whatever you like. There’s a gambling room even, lush red carpet all over the walls and the cling of a win chiming every other minute.

 But the house always wins, obviously. But we all knew that.

 The walls are always turning, and you will never see the same person twice at the party. The candles are always glittering and no footsteps will ever stain the cashmere carpets shadow black.

 There are no staff, and there are staff everywhere. A man everyone insists they’ve heard a friend of a friend once met insisted that he had been met by a hostess with long hair dyed blonde, who giggled at every comment he made and insisted he must be a comedian. No one agrees on what the hostess looks like, whether she has long blonde hair or short curly brown, whether she’s even a woman or if it’s a man in a fine suit and a owl mask, but everyone knows someone who has met the hostess.

 She always smiles and insists you enjoy your night.

 (They say, there are people who have never been found after attending the party. But everyone knows someone like that.)

 The windows spill night air in, smelling faintly of childhood memories and joy. Ivy and roses twirl on their grilles, keeping the mosquitos out and the patrons in. The clocks chime prettily every so often, but the night never ends.

 It truly never does, with all the excitement.

 The hotel must have had an owner once, before it became a house. No one’s ever met the owner, but everyone knows there’s always a party there once the sun has set. It’s so well-maintained, never anything like plumbing issues or blood on the bathroom floors.

 The house wouldn’t be crass like that, of course.

 The night is beautiful, of course. Nobody knows how it is, except that it must somehow be magic. The lights are always on, the fairy lights dancing around the corridors in corners that might conceivably be called dim compared to the rest of the house. There is always an eerie sense of laughter, always that sense of stumbling hazily from one room to the next, down corridors covered in the most magnificent carpets with strange oriental patterns and falling on a bed with the softest sheets. There’s always some soft tune even when you swear you’ve closed your door and someone just beyond the doorway.

 The house sings you to sleep, flutes and violins crooning you a little night time music for all the joy you’ve had. You drowse, makeup just warm enough to flush and the alcohol enough to paint everything in charcoal and watercolour, and then you close your eyes once, revelling in the celebration that nobody knows the reason for.

 And you never open them again.

 There’s no such thing as a haunted house these days. There’s no need for all the wailing and the slamming windows and doors or eerie shadows in strange places and cobwebs. There’s no need for ghosts and fury. The house remembers when it was first setting out and tried a video game arcade. It was good, of course, and it got its first taste there.

 Then, it realised the power of memories of a golden age. Memories that everyone has, of good old days when everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. It listened, to ballrooms and music, and learned from paintings and statues. It learned how to create dreams so sweet people didn’t want to wake in the first place.

 It wasn’t going to leave any ghosts, of course. Ghosts were easy enough to consume when you had already gotten the body and the mind.

 It didn’t take them all, of course. When the dawn light came, it gently opened doorways into gardens and driveways and tiny little apartments covered in water stains and fast food grease.

 You always need people to come back, after all. It’s not horrifying if it’s beautiful. It doesn’t matter how it’s beautiful as long as it is.

 So people wake, and they smile and they say,

 “There’s a party at the end of the world where nothing is real and everything is beautiful.

 And everybody, absolutely everybody, is invited.”

Comedy

Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial 201 prompt. In memory of Robin Williams.

We laugh because it is real

Serious and sometimes

Even awful

But clocked in a joke

It is made palpable

An easier to digest truth

Comedians nights

Allow us to face the uncomfortable

Gathering with our friends

Or family

Laughing uproariously at life’s

Strange truths

We feel better after

Taken what is called

The best medicine

But

We never wonder how the comedian feels

They are facing those hard truths

The things they disguise in jokes for our

Entertainment

Does our laughter

Hide their tears

Our glee

Their pain

Spare a thought or a prayer

For the comedians

At comedian nights

Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial, a short fanfic written for Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

I guess this was originally supposed to be for #FFF200 How far we've come, but I didn't make it in time so I managed to kind of rework this into this prompt.

TW: blood, implied torture

Fandoms: Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Word count: 1,000

Rating: T

Summary: Edelgard is no longer the girl she once was, but she remembers the one person who knew her before things changed.

There was a boy she once loved. She could not (or would not) remember his name. But there were days she wanted to pretend that there was still more time before she was forced to forget.

She had met him outside in the gardens, enthralled by even the spring’s hoarfrost that coated Faerghus during Great Tree Moon. A brilliant pop of red had caught her attention amongst the light touch of ice that blanketed the earth. Her small hands reached for it, a crimson flower in the wake of snow. She had never seen such a thing before, not from where she was from.

“You like that camellia?” a voice broke through the mist and her reverie.

She swiveled around, surprise on her face, and her heart thundering fast in her chest. “You startled me!” she exclaimed. She pouted. “Who are you anyway?”

She could picture the boy’s voice in her mind’s eye, even as his face had diminished with time. It had a gentle quality to it, a familiarity she only grew to appreciate. She could not remember the shape of his face, nor the sweep of his hair, but at least she remembered how blue his eyes were. And that was it.

He opened his mouth to say his name.

“I’m Edelgard,” she introduced herself. “I just moved here.”

The boy reached out a friendly hand. “Nice to meet you,” he replied. “Why don’t we be friends?”

He was warm. She could not forget that either. He was warm and kind in this new place she was forced to call home. But in the handful of years they had grown to know each other, he made the capital of Fhirdiad home for her.

He was a terrible dancer, a feat she was flummoxed by. He was a Kingdom noble, after all. Surely someone would have taught him how to move about on the ballroom floor.

And so, on the afternoon right before the comedian’s night in the gala that would celebrate the founding of Faerghus, she circled him around the gardens she had met him in while he stumbled over his own feet.

“Be steadier!” she commanded. “You’re the one who’s supposed to lead.”

He was nervous about her movements, stuttering over words and half-formed phrases. Her brown hair whipped around her face, and he spluttered when some of it caught in his mouth. All she could do was giggle at the ridiculousness of it all.

Flurries swirled around them, floating in pairs and bunches. They landed on her eyelashes and the cold made her cheeks rosy.

The two of them were out of breath when it was over. She found herself plopping down on the steps of the frozen fountain, panting beside him.

“El,” she said, and she turned to him. Her face felt warm when he looked at her. “The people closest to me call me that.”

The boy smiled. She sighed.

It was a good time in her life. A peaceful time, no matter her reasons for leaving Enbarr at first. But of course, none of that could last.

She recalled the terror the most on the day they parted. He frantically handed her a dagger, encouraging her to cut her own path forward.

“You can make it out there,” he had said. “I know you can.”

She took the gift but was then whisked away, unable to say anything other than, “I’ll see you again!” over her shoulder.

Over time, the terror strengthened. Her life became a haze of pain and suffering. All she could hear was her own screams in the depths of the palace in Enbarr as she wondered how and why she had to return when all she was given was this.

One by one her ten siblings perished, succumbing to the torture those men held for them below. Those men were so obsessed with power and what the Crests could afford them that they had tried to implant them in their bodies.

Her father, who was the emperor, was powerless to stop them.

The boy’s face faded behind blood and tears. She clutched the knife to her chest, intent on enduring. But even then, her reasoning for doing so blurred into nonexistence when she could not even remember who had given it to her in the first place.

Still, she emerged as the only survivor.

Her survival became her tether, her life. She wanted to uproot the system and kill those men who had thrust their ideals onto her and her lost siblings. She wanted revenge.

And so, she raised her relic, her axe, high above the King of Faerghus now.

“Edelgard! You…I will kill you!” Dimitri roared even on his knees. “You will know the regret of my father, who was killed for you! Of my stepmother, who was slain by her own daughter! You will bow your head before all the lives you trampled for your ideals before you die in misery!”

She tsked. The damp earth soaked into her boots and with each step toward him, she sank into the mud. “Farewell, King of Delusion,” she replied. “If only we lived in a time of peace, you might have lived a joyful life as a benevolent ruler.”

She swung her weapon in a spiteful arc. She had to get rid of this man who was standing in her way. He was the man who protected the Church of Seiros, and it was the church and its demon founder who had done this to her. They valued her for nothing.

Shlink!

“To the fires of eternity with you…El…” Dimitri gasped.

Edelgard stopped, eyes wide. “No,” she trembled. “It can’t be.”

They met again on the battlefield. It was some cruel and fateful irony after so long wishing she could see him just one more time. Just to remember him.

The boy fell on the day she finally did.

They were two toppling pillars in a world so changed. How far they had come. How far they had crumbled.